Published by Transit Books
2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612
www.transitbooks.org
Originally published in French as L’Autoportrait bleu
by Éditions Verticales © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2009
English translation © Sophie Lewis 2017
First published in English translation by Les Fugitives, London, 2017
The rights of Noémi Lefebvre and Sophie Lewis to be identified respectively as author and translator of this work have been identified in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN: 978-1-945492-12-9
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2018932617
DESIGN & TYPESETTING
Justin Carder
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Blue Self-Portrait
Noémi Lefebvre
Translator’s Note
Sophie Lewis
THE CAPTAIN ANNOUNCED SOMETHING NO IDEA WHAT, the steward demonstrated how to breathe with the mask on and how to tie the life jacket but I didn’t look up. I had exactly an hour and thirty minutes in which to switch languages. You’ll have to change that way you talk, my girl, I told myself in German, in French, then in German again, then in French, as if I was my own mother. I took stock of my wounds, from head to toe, from my head hammering with the wrath of grapes, my hunched shoulders, the skitterings in my stomach, my weak knees, both right and left, to my arms and legs grown skinny and me trembling all over almost without stopping; in short I was suffering a fundamental lack of serenity despite sending out serene signals; I was practically basking in fulfillment if you went solely on appearances. If I had allowed my inner goings-on to show you’d have taken me for a cow bellowing at the moon like the time in my car when I started bellowing, moo-calling, I mean, the nocturnal call of the cow, I still wonder how I did it that night, that particular freezing one, I emitted such a horrid bovine cry, there must have been something of the animal in me, a cow on the road, a great cry between two moments of civilization, of Zivilization, I was in simultaneous translation, now crazed down to my bony cylinders I reined in my savage cry, channeled all my energy towards serenity and it was working, so it appeared, no one in this plane would have heard my terrible cry of blöde Kuh as people call each other in Germany, stupid cow, I was translating in simulcast, the domestic yet animal Kuh who looks for her calf at dawn although she knows with her portion of bovine gray cells that the calf with the number-stamped ear will never come back because he is too lastingly not there, goes on calling out for a day or two but ends up buttoning her bellow, goes back to ruminating as if she never had that calf, one calf, nor two or three or any calf with or without a number, the animal who truly sees the dying of each second. I had bellowed so hard that evening that I’d frightened myself, I was so closely aligned with the cow that I was practically in symbiosis with nature, toe-to-toe with nature, as if between she and I the distance had vanished, verschwunden, I translated automatically. And now the desire to bellow seized me again, in mid Berlin-Paris flight. You go to Venice and you end up dying in Venice, you go to a sanatorium and you end up with tuberculosis, one’s environment has a disproportionate impact, I observed yet again, this time inside the plane: no matter what exactly changes around you, wham you are completely messed up, maybe even dead. I hadn’t noticed takeoff, yet I was flying and, as I’m not the keenest breed of traveler, the mere fact of our flight could in itself have sent me into a tailspin, the altitude alone potentially enough to tip me over, though I was unaffected by this flight still my sister was. We’re flying my sister said, can you feel it, we’re flying! Flying has a big impact on me, every time feels as big as my first flight, I could see the effect on her but nothing for me, I said I could feel it but I couldn’t; so we wouldn’t get started I opened a book and got stuck in. I did my best to lose myself in my book, to become as one with the book, to think of nothing outside it, to feel nothing except what was sensed by my eyes on the paper but of course I could see myself clearly trying to forget myself and trying to become as one and dissolve myself so really I wasn’t absorbed in anything, was becoming nothing and could feel nothing at all. That was a super trip my sister said, said over and over, and I replied yes, super, exceptional, I’ll never forget it, she said again and I replied me neither, never. I was actually thinking never, truly never, how could I forget, and my insides were exploding noiselessly while meltwater flowed from my forehead and down my back.
Coming out of the Kaiser Café in the Sony Center, after dizzying the pianist with a flood of verbiage, I’d literally floored him by talking, I took advantage of him being German-American to clap him on the back matily as I’ve seen Germans do and also in old American films, though it’s rarely done by women, I don’t recall a woman ever doing it in an old American film, I was devastated that I’d talked so much, I talked your ear off, so so sorry, I said while clapping him on the back like a man which I’m not, like
